The 101 Best Aquarium Plants: How to Choose Hardy, Vibrant, Eye-Catching Species That Will Thrive in Your Home Aquarium (Adventurous Aquarist Guide) [Paperback]

Mary E. Sweeney (Author), George Farmer (Photographer), Neil Hepworth (Photographer), Aaron Norman (Photographer), Jeff Ucciardo (Photographer)

Book Description

Series: Adventurous Aquarist Guide | Publication Date: August 2008

Whether you are a new or intermediate hobbyist, The 101 Best Aquarium Plants is the perfect pocket-sized guide for navigating the booming planted aquarium market.

The 101 Best Aquarium Plants makes aquascaping and keeping healthy aquatic plants simple by providing clear, expert advice and recommendations that greatly improve the hobbyist’s chances of success. It presents 101 full-page species accounts of plants that are not only appealing in appearance but can thrive in aquarium tanks. Also included are 33 species to avoid—plants that are not compatible with home aquariums or that tend to perish in the hands of inexperienced aquarists. Written by an experienced aquarium hobbyist, this title features must-know buying, fertilization, and keeping tips, plus easy-to-use keys to sizes and care requirements. The book is organized for instant look-up, with color-coding to highlight species that will fit into aquarium systems of different sizes. The brilliant full-color identifying photos serve as the perfect comple

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

MARY E. SWEENEY is the former editor of Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine and a longtime book author and editor. She lives, writes and keeps and breeds tropical fishes at the Water Witch Club, her family home in Monmouth Hills, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Tfh Pubns Inc (August 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189008719X
• ISBN-13: 978-1890087197
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Animal Care & Pets > Fish & Aquariums
  • #24 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Marine Biology

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars No one has reviewed this yet?!?, November 18, 2008

By 

Breck Breckenridge (Spokane, Washington) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The 101 Best Aquarium Plants: How to Choose Hardy, Vibrant, Eye-Catching Species That Will Thrive in Your Home Aquarium (Adventurous Aquarist Guide) (Paperback)

Well, I must say at the outset that this is a book I currently have on loan from my Spokane library. I discovered no one has reviewed it here on Amazon when I came here looking to buy it and wanting to know what others thought about it! I have not seen alot of aquarium plant books yet, certainly not Hiscock's, which seem to be strongly represented here. Mary Sweeney's book is a little "pocketbook" type (called a turtle?). It is only 11 cm wide by 20 cm long. Very "handy".

As for the contents, I can say two things right off the bat: 1) the text is good to a point but has some problems (see below); 2) the photos are sometimes good and sometimes not so good.

Concerning the text, the plant species are not arranged alphabetically, but rather by some grouping which I have not yet fathomed. This means I have to continually be going back to the index for page numbers of certain species. Granted the editors have given us a "cheat sheet" of genus names and their pages on both insides of front and back covers, but still... Also, the treatments for each species are not equally thorough. We get complete descriptions, etc. for some species in a genus but then the rest get short shrift. Those that get the short comments often do not have their sizes mentioned. This is irritating. I want to at least know how big each plant will get. Granted this is 101 Best so I should be content with that, but I already want more and it is not there.

With regard to the photos, sometimes they are really quite good. Then there are those that aren't. The disparity is sometimes very great. On the whole I would say the photos are good about 80% of the time. Admittedly it must be a b*tch trying to take photos of plants in water!

This book is copyrighted 2008, so it is up-to-date. Its newness may be one reason why the used ones are still commanding new prices, more or less. I was hoping to find a copy cheaply :-) because this will not be my only aquarium plants book. I just started in my interest in having an aquarium that is strongly oriented to plants (I am afterall a botanist), so the fact that I am already having to look in this book and in Barron's Plants for the Aquarium, and am already contemplating getting Hiscock says something about the level "101" is written on.

So I give it a three rating.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This beginner finds it very helpful, February 24, 2009

By 

NatCh - See all my reviews

This review is from: The 101 Best Aquarium Plants: How to Choose Hardy, Vibrant, Eye-Catching Species That Will Thrive in Your Home Aquarium (Adventurous Aquarist Guide) (Paperback)

I've kept aquariums before with moderate success, but I'm setting up a new one after a 13 years hiatus (during which I moved around a lot) and I've never kept live plants before.

I was looking for a good, basic reference that would help me decide which plants might be good for what I have planned and which wouldn't. The factors I'm following are height, growth rate, lighting needs, and supplementation (C02, fertilizer and such) requirements, as well as the usual things you'd pay attention to with the fish themselves -- temperature, PH, water hardness, etc.

With only 101 species claimed, it's not going to be, by any means, an exhaustive look at the aquatic plant world, but I found very few species listed for sale on various websites (including e-bay) that weren't covered in this book. This is particularly valuable to me because those sites often list very little in the way of the details I was looking for, and with things like e-bay, you have to wonder how accurate whatever details are there actually are.

The only real drawback to it, from my perspective, is that when it groups several varieties of the same plant, it doesn't always include size differences in the smaller blurbs, and I'm suspicious that those sizes do vary.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with it in the role of a basic, beginner's reference.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quick Guide to Plants, January 6, 2011

By 

Surveyor "Book reader" (outside your window) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The 101 Best Aquarium Plants: How to Choose Hardy, Vibrant, Eye-Catching Species That Will Thrive in Your Home Aquarium (Adventurous Aquarist Guide) (Paperback)

This is a good book to have with you when you go to the store to shop for plants. Packaged and designed like a "field guide" it will fit easily into a coat pocket or purse and is well organized to quickly find teh species you may be looking at in the store.
Obviously, it is somewhat limited to 101 (or so) plants, but really covers those plants well, even admitting some of them are harder to care for than others!